Converting Painting into Sculpture: William Rubin onEllsworth Kelly's Signature Style, in 1963

Installation view of Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks Gallery.

©ELLSWORTH KELLY/COURTESY MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

With four shows at Matthew Marks Gallery,Ellsworth Kelly is having one of the mostexciting moments in his career at age 92.These shows find Kelly continuing his interestin blurring the line between painting andsculpture. His colorful and seemingly simpleforms lend themselves to contemplation, and,in ARTnews' November 1963 issue, WilliamRubin thought long and hard about whatmakes Kelly's work so effective. Rubin, whohad not yet become a curator in or director ofthe Museum of Modern Art's Painting andSculpture department, wrote about howKelly's work was "neither a reaction to Abstract-Expressionism nor the outcome of a dialogue withhis contemporaries." Rubin's full article follows below.--Alex Greenberger

"Ellsworth Kelly: The big form"

By William Rubin

Leader of the so-called "Hard-Edge" school, this younger American shows consistent developmenttowards surprisingly ambiguous goals; he exhibits this month in New York

Never more than in the past few years have repackaged esthetic formulas been promoted into newname brands. This prestidigitation--it has been called "instant art history"--depends on the hand of

the artist being quicker than the eye of the audience, and what it creates is not so much the historyas the para-history of art, properly the domain of the cultural historian. The proliferation of suchworks is encouraged by confusion in the mind of the spectator between the genuinely new and thespeciously new, between the truly original and its counterfeit. And the alacrity with which theseworks are taken up is, in its turn, a reaction to a century of seeing new art first derided and thencanonized by history. But if all great modern art has, to some extent, looked new, it does not followthat all new-looking modern art is great, or even good.It seems to me significant that the consciouspursuit of novelty should have entered modern painting at a time (1915-20) when the tremendousmomentum built up by the movements spanning Impressionism and Cubism began to wane, and thatthis pursuit should have received fresh impetus in the wake of the powerful first generation of theNew American Painting. From the advent of Impressionism until the First World War neither artistsnor critics placed a premium on originality for its own sake. Manet had set the tone in stating thathe "presumed neither to overthrow earlier painting nor make it new," but "merely tried to be himselfand not somebody else." To such pioneers originality was a natural, though by no means inevitable,by-product of making good paintings. Only with the Dadas and Surrealists did originality--soondistinguishable from novelty--become an end in itself. "Before all else," said Picabia, "we wanted tomake something new, something that nobody had ever done before." It was precisely with Dadaismthat real esthetic invention tended to become confused with illusory originality. Since inspirationcannot be forced, since plastic creativity is a matter of genius fulfilling itself, the demand for noveltyled many lesser painters into "literature," that is, beyond the legitimate poetry of imageryorganically tied to plastic structures, and into an essentially extra-esthetic iconographic activity.Illusory originality thus became dependent on an ever increasing load of marginal, often franklyliterary, gimmicks and effects of a type with which the past several years have more thanreacquainted us.

Ellsworth Kelly, Red Curves, 2014, painted aluminum.

©ELLSWORTH KELLY/COURTESY MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

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